Delhi’s seasonal illumination.

[Text and photos by Mayank Austen Soofi]

Leaves are slowly swaying in the mild breeze; people are walking with heads down.

Such are the shadows falling on the roadside wall of tree-lined Kasturba Gandhi Marg. Caressed by the setting sun’s lukewarm light, the opaqueness of the painted bricks has been replaced by a strange iridescence, making the shadows look as clear as Matisse’s famous cut-outs.

This happens every evening. But the phenomenon becomes more compelling at this time of the year–in and around October. The summer and monsoon are over, the deep winter is still to set in, and Dilli’s air is relatively free of smog. All these conditions unite to give the city a peculiar October light, which, at the day’s end, gives a delicate touch to everything on which it falls. You cannot experience the penetrating potency of this light by looking up at the pink sky, or towards the small red sun. You have to search for surfaces that trap it.

Not to worry if the Kasturba Gandhi Marg wall is too far for you. The October light plays up the interiors of homes as well, illuminating ordinary drawing room sofas by curtained windows, as observed in a 2 BHK Ghaziabad flat this week.

Or take a street in Old Delhi. It is 4pm, one section of the cramped lane is all gold, the other is all black. A flock of birds is circling around the place, now turning black, now turning gold.

In Connaught Place, the same light falls on the white columns of the Inner Circle, turning the colonial-era concrete into something less hard, almost malleable, displaying the shadows of passing shoppers. See photo.

On a service lane in posh Jor Bagh, behind the white-and-red post office building, the evening light has kindled up a rutty patch of grass, as if a bush were set ablaze. Nearby, three men are chatting over glasses of pavement chai, oblivious to the sight.

In Gurugram’s Sadar Bazar, this seemingly soft light spars like a hardy warrior with the jagged ramparts of the Ghamand Saraii gateway. It seeps into the monument’s old uneven stones, dissolving their solidness, illuminating them from within.

Then there is the lake in Hauz Khas Village. In the evening, the smelly water turns gold. As the evening ends, the gold goes, the smell stays.

Season’s light

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